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Set in a rural farming town in the 1970’s, under which an ugly truth smoulders, Sue Orr’s first novel, The Party Line, traces the arrival of new sharemilkers into the town of Fenward, and the disruption one particular family causes to that town’s culture of silent complicity to ugly acts.
The novel revolves around young Nickie Walker, the almost-teenage daughter of farmers, who strikes up a friendship with glamorous, charismatic Gabrielle Baxter, the daughter of a newly widowed sharemilker who has just moved to town. Gabrielle’s presence is immediately magnetic and disruptive, and it is under Gabrielle’s influence that Nickie begins to question the status quo of the town she’s grown up in. Moreover, when both girls witness something they wish they hadn’t, it is Gabrielle who is willing to do something about it, rather than to ‘toe the party line’.
Orr paints a portrait of this small farming town that is totally believable, with its Calf Club Days, its oppressively hot summers, and its clenched-fist, suspicious resistance to difference or change. There’s also a mob-mentality-like refusal to act when action is needed, and in some ways Orr’s delineation of this reflects that quintessentially Kiwi saying “She’ll be right”. In this context, saying “She’ll be right” just means ignoring a problem until it goes away, and Orr’s novel shows all too clearly how troubling such an attitude can be.
Despite the overall intense believability of the rest of the characters, I had some difficulty believing in Gabrielle, the catalyst for so much of the action in this novel. To me, her charisma and allure were not enough for me to understand her character fully, and as such, her character remained an enigma, or, if anything, a performance (multiple times she seems to pretend to cry—which confounds both the characters in the book, and confounded me!) On occasion I wondered if she was a kind of ‘manic pixie dream girl’ – a charming bundle of slightly odd characteristics embodied in a character, but not a real person. In the end, I decided that she wasn’t—she has a background, and some kind of inner life—but our access to that inner life seems always to be obstructed. The slipperiness of her character strangely dimmed my enjoyment of the book.
In contrast, I found the subtle transformation of Nickie’s mother Joy to be extremely compelling. Seen at first as something of a harridan by her daughter, Joy Walker eventually becomes a much deeper, nuanced character, who has herself become aware of the strain of nastiness that runs through the town. It is this kind of gentle, sure-footed development of characters in this novel that I found most absorbing, and, along with Orr’s well-shaped prose, is, I believe, what makes this novel such high quality reading. An assured debut novel.
Reviewed by Feby Idrus
The Party Line
by Sue Orr
Published by Vintage
ISBN 9781775537557
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